“When my daughter asked why she couldn’t have an Alexa like her friends, I told her that it is because Alexa steals your dreams and sells them “
La Favola
How to check your email in 1984
The Chinese Room Thinks
In my view, one of the most famous thought experiments in philosophy, John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment, has been decisively answered by science. The Chinese Room thinks. Here’s a recap of the argument from the SEP
The argument and thought-experiment now generally known as the Chinese Room Argument was first published in a 1980 article by American philosopher John Searle (1932– ). It has become one of the best-known arguments in recent philosophy. Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room.
The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but could not produce real understanding. Hence the “Turing Test” is inadequate. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. The broader conclusion of the argument is that the theory that human minds are computer-like computational or information processing systems is refuted. Instead minds must result from biological processes; computers can at best simulate these biological processes. Thus the argument has large implications for semantics, philosophy of language and mind, theories of consciousness, computer science and cognitive science generally. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument.
Now consider the recent and stunning output from Google’s Pathway Languages Model
Vienna is rightly regarded as one of Europe’s most elegant capital cities, resplendent with Baroque architecture and built upon centuries of the Imperial grandeur and wealth of the Hapsburg Empire. A city where visitors can spend a weekend marvelling at the Lipizzaner horses performing precise equine ballet at the Spanish Riding School before visiting the homes of Mozart, Haydn and Strauss, and then dropping by one of the grand coffee houses to enjoy the famous Sacher-Torte and other exquisite pastries and cakes.
I LEFT A voice message for Dave the day he died. [1] I don’t know if he heard it. He didn’t call back. It wouldn’t have made any difference one way or the other to what happened next, but it’s not the message I would have left if I had known what he was planning. If I had known, I would have said goodbye.
David Foster Wallace Said I Spoke to Him Like He Was a Dog
Neuroscientists from MIT scanned the brain of hyperpolyglot Vaughn Smith, a carpet cleaner who grew up in the D.C. area and can carry on conversations in 24 languages
This guy speaks a lot of languages
An interesting piece on how we track Russia’s nuclear activities (NYT). And kinetic weapons from space
A site to match Ukrainian students with foreign universities.
The Macedonian “You Won’t Be Alone” is an excellent movie.
LDS growth and shrinkage numbers, country by country — Congo!
Most downloaded apps in Russia, February vs. March.